Donald Trump picked Katy Tur, a young NBC News correspondent, as his favorite target in the “fake news” media. Why this curious choice for repeated taunting? First, and probably most important, she was a she. She was short, and we know Trump hates anything small. She was a campaign trail novice. Easy pickings for intimidation, Trump must have figured.

At rallies, he singled Tur out for calumny and in tweets he tried out his trademark insults: “third-rate reporter,” “should be fired,” “dishonest reporting,” “incompetent,” “incorrect story,” “lied.” She vividly recaptures the moment when Trump told her to “be quiet,” a condescension that went viral on Twitter. She could not quite believe the candidate had dared to “shush” her. Worse, he once attacked her so personally and stridently at a rally that she had to be escorted out by the Secret Service because angry Trump supporters looked like they might physically harm her. While Trump singled out many female reporters for insult, including two journalists from The Times, Maureen Dowd and Maggie Haberman, Tur seemed always to be the one he hammered hardest.

“Unbelievable,” Tur’s short and breezy campaign memoir, is the story of how she soldiered on. It is also the familiar tale of how a relatively inexperienced woman is looked down on and underestimated, both by the candidate she covered and by her network superiors. By the end of “Unbelievable” it’s clear how wrong they all were in thinking they could run over “Little Katy” (Trump’s snide name for Tur).

This book couldn’t be more timely, appearing as President Trump ratchets up his attacks on the news media. At a Phoenix rally just a few weeks ago, he called reporters “sick people” who “don’t like our country.” Several journalists wrote afterward that these kinds of attacks are inviting physical harm. “Unbelievable” offers a vivid sense of how threatening Trump’s personal insults can feel.

Tur began covering him when, on a home visit to New York from her base in London, one of her bosses picked her for what was assumed to be a short assignment — reporting on Trump’s losing bid for the nomination. She joined an unusual, all-female NBC bench of campaign correspondents.

Almost immediately, @realDonaldTrump lit into her with four slashing tweets. His pique was raised because Tur herself had tweeted about protesters who had forced him to abandon the stage at a rally. The attack on Tur revealed how closely Trump monitored every word of his campaign coverage, from the morning shows to nightly broadcasts to Twitter.

“Imagine your friend or boss calling you a liar,” Tur writes of their first confrontation. “Now amplify the experience by a thousand.” She describes how “waves of insults and threats poured into my phone — the device buzzing like a shock collar.” Trump supporters were both fanatically loyal and mad as rabid dogs.

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Next, he pointed her out to the crowd at a South Carolina rally, calling her a liar. She told herself to shake it off and smile, vowing not to let him “get into my head.” But the jeering men standing on their seats to get a look at her were scary. When members of the angry crowd milled around her after she finished her live broadcast for MSNBC, the Secret Service assigned to protect Trump needed to usher her and her producer out. Her mother, a battle-hardened photojournalist herself, called her daughter later that night, begging her to get more security. It was then, Tur writes, that she realized, “I’m a target.”

And so it went through election night. Like a plucky Jean Arthur character in a ’30s screwball comedy, Tur evolved into a seasoned campaign reporter and never let Trump get under her skin. Meanwhile, in between the personal blasts — and in a pattern typical of his love/hate relationship with the press — Trump granted her interviews. He hated what reporters wrote about him but he could not exist without their attention. Tur does a good job explaining the dynamics of this weird, symbiotic relationship.

The more personal story Tur tells in “Unbelievable” is also compelling. Her parents were daredevil journalists in Los Angeles, hanging out of helicopters, sometimes with their daughter in tow, to shoot footage of news events like Madonna’s 1985 wedding to Sean Penn. They were the first to film a police car pursuit from the air. After making a fortune with their own news service, they went bust, a dislocating experience for their child. Although the insecurity of her early life made her want to avoid journalism and become a lawyer or doctor instead, she knew she was hooked when she made her college boyfriend run with her to see a roaring Malibu brush fire. Her father was furious, telling her that by going into journalism she was consigning herself to a job flipping hamburgers, but she landed a position at a Los Angeles television station. The newsroom, she writes, “smelled like must, dust and videotape. Exactly like it did when I was little. I was home.”

From reading profiles of Tur during the campaign, I knew of her strained relationship with her transgender father, who became a woman after his journalism career collapsed. This aspect of her life remains unexplored. Since “Unbelievable” is a campaign memoir and not an autobiography, it’s understandable that exploring the subject would have resulted in a different kind of book.

In a previous article in the Book Review, I wrote about the degradation of the campaign book genre. The most valuable of such books, like Richard Ben Cramer’s “What It Takes,” about all the candidates in 1988, tell the reader something important about the fundamental character of the people who run for president. Others, like “An American Melodrama,” by three British journalists, about the turmoil in 1968, say something valuable about the fabric of the country and the concerns of voters. Some reveal how election coverage has changed. Unfortunately, “Unbelievable” does none of these things.

Unlike two other recent books about the 2016 election, “Shattered,” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, which focuses on the dysfunction of the Clinton campaign, and “ Devil’s Bargain,” by Joshua Green, which dissects the relationship between Trump and his Svengali, Steve Bannon, Tur’s account has no juicy insider details. It doesn’t say anything new about Trump and appears to have been dashed off. I found the narrative hard to follow. The chronology is purposely jumbled, jumping back and forth from the frenzy of election night to the rest of the campaign and then weaving in short takes from Tur’s personal life. Navigating through the book can be confusing.

But one subject that Tur richly examines is the outrageous sexism of Trump and many of his supporters, for instance, capturing the full horror of a Mike Pence rally in New Hampshire where the anti-Clinton chants included “assassinate that bitch.” In another instance, she lashed out at a Trump supporter who had told a CNN reporter she was ugly and needed more makeup. Tur claims that most Trump supporters were not innately cruel and would probably not say such things at work or at home. At Trump rallies, however, they became “unchained,” transformed in repulsive ways.

As a reporter for NBC, Tur was assigned the task of alerting the Trump campaign to the now notorious “Access Hollywood” tape, but she doesn’t explain why the network allowed itself to be scooped by The Washington Post, though.

“Unbelievable” does capture the competitiveness within network television. Tur recounts her understandable disappointment when she was cut out of coverage of an NBC presidential debate and had to see Lester Holt, Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie take over. All of them were more famous than she was but none of them had endured months of following Trump around the country. (After the election, Tur was given her own afternoon show on MSNBC.)

Tur was one of the few reporters covering him who thought Trump would win. Though her book stops on election night, its apt title could be applied to every aspect of his presidency, too. Tur, surely, isn’t surprised.

Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of The Times, is a political columnist for The Guardian and a senior lecturer at Harvard.